The “definitive” version of this game sounds a lot like a dodgy mobile port

Dungeon Defenders fans are absolutely livid over the latest release from Trendy Entertainment.

Dungeon Defenders Eternity is described on Steam as “the definitive version of the hit tower defense action RPG”.

Early user reviews paintes a very, very different story. Like the mobile version, and unlike the original, when Eternity first hit Steam it had no single-player mode, included a microtransaction shop, used PlayVerse rather than Steam to match make and required an always-on Internet connection. The reviews described a game bursting with bugs, too.

This has disappointed fans, to put it mildly, but it’s the fact that the game seems to be a quick port of the mobile version rather than the expected enhaced re-release of Dungeon Defenders for PC that has them hopping mad.

Trendy might have been able to live it down if not for an unfortunate mistake publishing Dungeon Defenders Eternity on Steam; as chronicled in screenshots by Kotaku, it initially labelled the game as including a single-player mode. That sort of thing really gets up people’s nostrils.

The publisher said it has heard the feedback plans to restore missing features

“Many of our loyalist fans have wondered where single player and private sessions went in today’s release. In order to minimize hacking and cheats in the game, Eternity is now hosted on our own servers,” Trendy wrote in a statement to Kotaku.

“Turning these features off in our initial release of Eternity was related to our fear that the server costs would be exponential, and cause us to lose significant money.

“We realise that jeopardizing the loyalty of fans far outweighs the risk of profit – and it was a mistake.

“We’re deeply committed to maintaining that relationship with our players, and to that end, we will be re-releasing the game within the next few hours with singleplayer functionality fully integrated.”

At time of writing the game’s Steam description included a single-player mode, so it seems Trendy has followed through on its promise already.

It’s sad to see Trendy the subject of such derision, as when Dungeon Defenders was first announced the publisher took a laudable stance towards cross-platform play, vowing that all platforms should be able to play together. To go from being hailed as pro-gamer to vilified for its errors is a pity.